In the modern business environment, large amounts of data, documents, and other information are often stored in data repositories. This information typically represents important business assets, and therefore must be secured, retained, and controlled in accordance with departmental, corporate, government, or other types of guidelines and regulations. For businesses or enterprises to succeed, mission-critical information must be easily and quickly accessible, in addition to being provided to end users in a way that maximizes productivity. However, the requisite security, retention, and control goals often prevent efficient and accurate management and distribution of information, which can be costly and damaging. In particular, by not providing the right information to the right people in a timely, effective, and meaningful way, security may be compromised, downtime may result, and resources may be unnecessarily wasted.
Likewise, an important enterprise objective is turning data into usable information. However, existing storage structures and schemas are not conducive to meeting potentially wide variations in the needs of end-users. For example, many enterprises are broken into separate departments, where end-users in a first department may wish to view data in one format, while users in a second department may wish to view the same data in an entirely different format. Furthermore, some data may be stored online (e.g., a live, active repository), while other data may be stored offline (e.g., a tape backup or other long-term repository), yet efficient operation of a business may depend on having both online and offline repositories accessible. However, existing systems are unable to effectively bridge the gap between managing data that resides in repositories and delivering information to end users in a secure, timely, and customizable fashion.
Therefore, existing systems lack mechanisms for distributing, viewing, and managing online and offline data throughout an enterprise. Existing systems also lack mechanisms for allowing users with varying needs to manipulate data in customizable ways, while preserving the integrity of the underlying data. Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.